Credit: That damn clown used to blink!

POLYPHONIC SPREE

Try erasing a sound from your memory. Imagine a time when there was say – no electric guitar sound, no Hammond Organ. More specifically, try to imagine a time where there was no electronic music.

After so many years of dance pioneers, electro pop hits, beeps and blips, tones and beats. Think of them gone - an absence in your aural knowledge. Then try to think of them as something new.

It’s not easy to get the genie back in the bottle, but the Turntable Café at the Royal Festival Hall tried to remind us of this time with its Radiophonic Workshop edition recently. I thought I might be in for a night of dire soulless sounds but found out that the precursors of our current easy listening were busy trying to realise a concept so weird that they seemed unsure anything audible would come of it, let alone decades of familiar sound.

The noise I am trying to describe can be found in Sci Fi classics such as Quatermass and the Pit, The day of the Triffids and the like. Those odd sounds of the future that seem so hokey in Sci Fi movies that look so clunky….the nerve tickling whines and unearthly changes in tone were unheard of and so well suited to a genre that was exploring the paranoia of science.

RETRO DOC

The Turntable café also saw fit to show us some old documentaries of the time. Daphne Oram, one of the pioneers of the BBC electronic sound, paints 35 mm film to make extraordinary noises and young men with amusing 60s spectacle frames and brown ties mess with their oscillators. It was interesting until the final performance of some of the worst brain numbing aural torture I have heard in a long time.

To appreciate the traditional instruments and vocal gymnastics with a machine producing seemingly incoherent beeps is not easy and it was one hell of a long arrangement. It sounded like an awful lot of bollocks, but at odd moments, reminded that these sounds didn’t exist before then; it was an incredible feat and must have taken an age to put together.